In June of 2016, Facebook dispatched what is often called an “embed.” He was a young man from its ad-sales department who had previously worked for several Republican-affiliated causes. He spent most of the next four months in San Antonio, working with the Trump campaign. Other Facebook employees rotated through the office on a semi-regular basis; Google and Twitter also sent sales reps to the campaign.
“On the commercial side, all big accounts get reps like this,” Tatenda Musapatike, a former Facebook sales rep, told me. “It’s standard. Coca-Cola gets a Facebook rep, working on commission, whose job is to advocate for Coca-Cola within Facebook, and vice versa.” Sales reps were taught that the more useful they were to clients, the more money those clients were apt to spend. “Managers would always talk about ‘earning the badge,’ ” she continued. “As in, you’re so tightly aligned with your client that they think of you as part of their team, and they give you a security badge to get in and out of the building.” In a 2017 paper in the journal
Political Communication, Daniel Kreiss and a fellow communications scholar, Shannon McGregor, wrote that embeds “go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers.” (Facebook still offers extensive support to political campaigns, but it claims that this support no longer includes embeds.)
The notes taken by the Project Alamo staffer describe a tense office-wide meeting, early in the campaign, during which Parscale made it clear that he distrusted the reps from Facebook and Google, whose bosses presumably wanted Trump to lose. Shortly thereafter, the Facebook embed demonstrated his value: he designed a Custom List of everyone who had interacted with one of Trump’s Facebook pages during the primaries, then sent those people targeted ads asking for donations. The ads cost three hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars; they raised $1.32 million, a net gain of a million dollars in a single day. After that, Parscale started taking the Facebook embed’s advice.
During the election, the embed did his best to keep a low public profile. The day after Trump’s victory, Gary Coby, the campaign’s digital-advertising director, tagged him in a tweet, calling him “an MVP” of the campaign. The embed was twenty-eight-year-old James Barnes, from Tennessee. He responded to his newfound notoriety by deleting his Twitter account.
Barnes recently told me that, although he grew up in an evangelical family and had long considered himself a Republican, “I despised Donald Trump from the moment I knew anything about him.” On November 8, 2016, after spending months working overtime to help Trump win, he and a few Facebook colleagues went to the polls in Washington, D.C., and he cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton. “My attitude during the entire campaign was, I’m a professional, I’m here to do a job, my personal preferences are irrelevant,” he said. Last year, “after reflecting on a lot of things, including my personal sense of duty,” he quit Facebook. He now works at
Acronym, a left-wing nonprofit that is using social-media marketing to try to defeat Trump in 2020. (Acronym is also the main investor in Shadow, the company behind the app that broke down during this year’s Iowa caucuses.)
people will continue to do what they are told for a check or for self interest
